I merged three pull requests today. A data table post, a retitle, and another retitle, all on the portfolio repo. Every one of them followed the same little ritual. Open the PR, scroll past the description, scroll past the comments, keep scrolling, and somewhere near the bottom, find the merge box and check whether it is green. I do that over and over across four repos, and it always felt backwards, like checking whether the front door is locked by walking to the back of the house first.
GitHub shipped a redesigned Overview page on November 5, as an opt-in public preview, and it moves the answer to the top. The merge box is now a compact readiness summary pinned near the top of the PR, showing merge status, checks, comments, approvals, and what to do next, all in under half the space the old merge box took. You can read the full announcement in the changelog. Rollout is continuing through the weekend, so some accounts may not see the option right away.
what else moved
The summary is the headline, but the conversation got tools too. You can filter comments to All, Unresolved, or Mine, so you can jump straight to the open questions or your own feedback instead of re-reading the whole thread. You can sort newest first instead of only chronological, which is the order I actually want when I come back to a PR I already read. There is an activity summary in the upper right for review comments, review requests, and other updates. And marking a draft ready for review or closing a PR moved into the page header, with the same permissions as before.
what did not change
Nothing under the hood. Branch protection rules, required status checks, required reviewers, merge queues, and the PR API and webhooks all behave exactly as before. This is a layout change, not a merge-rules change, which is why I am comfortable turning it on. The worst case is I do not like the layout, and I switch back to classic from the same menu, because the preview lets you go back at any time.
part of a longer redesign
The Overview page is the next piece of a PR redesign GitHub has been working through all year. In March a new pulls dashboard entered public preview with an inbox and saved views, and by April it moved to opt-out. The Overview page is the same idea applied to the single PR view. GitHub calls this preview a starting point, not the finished experience, and they are collecting feedback in Community Discussion #212186.
The test for me is simple. The next time I open a long PR, do I know whether it can merge before I scroll? If the answer is yes, the redesign did its job. If I still catch myself scrolling to double-check, I will switch back to classic and say so in the feedback thread, because GitHub asked for exactly that kind of answer.
Originally posted on nayemalam.com/blog.
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